Best Poems - Satirical

Best Poems – SYMBOLISM

“O, the curve of that little rounded
fruit, skin stretched and
tight, like a teenager’s

O when my teeth pierce
through that skin and sink
into the juice, the truth of the grape.

O to be a grape picker in a vineyard,
to squish the supple fruit like
eyeballs, sweet juice and skin between my toes.

O the lovely corner where
Blue Street crosses Red Road,
at that corner, my heart lives.

O Mother’s spider-veins running lazily
down her legs like wise and 
winding violet rivers.

O plum-colored bruises, star clusters,
broken blood vessels, spread haphazardly
beneath my grey/green slanting eye.

O beating, bleeding heart,
the taste of my rough cat-tongue,
the color of the womb.

O whenever I taste guava,
I taste you
exploding, pulsing thought my mouth.

O lovely richness,
the symbol of royalty,
the color of my soul expanding.

O purple, if you were a lady 
you’d have almond eyes, swinging hips,
and always a sideways grin.

O field of wildflowers
in sweet Tennessee grass,
color of a jellyfish’s sting.

O lilacs, violets, lollipops,
Prince and his Purple Rain,
Dark wine staining my lips and mouth.”

“Royal blue azure blue
The nobility of a colour
to clothe the uncertainty of conditions.
Green-blue turquoise blue
The adornments of nature
scorn the audacities of imitation
they ornament the fleeting hair of the tornado.
Ash grey, dirty grey, iron grey, pearl grey
The metamorphosing power of a colour
which shatters the yokes of comparison.
Sulpher yellow, saffron yellow, golden yellow
Fever can be yellow
Yellow is a self-respecting colour
The yellow of the egg was the beginning
But the respect for a colour is only apparent
when the yellow peril is in question.
Vermilion red, blood red, poppy red
Cardinals’ purple is a red
which sends howling the Gehenna of fear.
The purple of Caesars is all-conquering
Cortez and Pizarro have flaunted the colours of Europe
to the redskins in organizing a hecatomb.
Marxism-Leninism is red
There are colours of poverty
fetishist colours
opulent colours
colours which strike terror or which the whole world unfurls.
Milk white kapok white
The moon is white
Innocence is white
the blindman’s stick is white
the Ku-Klux-Klan is robed in white
my village was evangelized by the White Fathers.
Their words were transmitted with the aid of white cold steel.
To fashion the centuries of history
men have invented all the nuances of a colour
Black bread, black night, black misery
Mourning is black, the devil is black
with black ebony one can construct
a black market to supply the fields 
with cotton of the whitest fibre.
The colours which compose my rainbow
Have the density of shadows.
At the borders of my rainbow
history has allowed only a clear obscurity to float.
Like a raging cataract
the dusky shadows of my colour
make a rampart around my house
every time I try to break
the barriers of colour.
Red, blue, yellow, white, black.
The shadows of colours are not truly multicoloured.
Red as palm oil
The snow hides in its own whiteness
behind my door
it will not see me
I have ceased to be the shadow of my colour.”

“The tip of the nose seemed the first to be lost,
then the arms and legs,
and later the stone penis if such a thing were featured.

And often an entire head followed the nose
as it might have done when bread
was baking in the side streets of ancient Rome.

No hope for the flute once attached
to the lips of that satyr with the puffed-out cheeks,
nor for the staff the shepherd boy once leaned on,

the sword no longer gripped by the warrior,
the poor lost ears of the sleeping boy,
and whatever it was Aphrodite once held in her severed hand.

But the torso is another story—
middle man, the last to go, bluntly surviving,
propped up on a pedestal with a length of pipe,

and the mighty stone ass endures,
so smooth and fundamental, no one
hesitates to leave the group and walk behind to stare.

And that is the way it goes here
in the diffused light from the translucent roof,
one missing extremity after another—

digits that got too close to the slicer of time,
hands snapped off by the clock,
whole limbs caught in the mortal thresher.

But outside on the city streets,
it is raining, and the pavement shines
with the crisscross traffic of living bodies—

hundreds of noses still intact,
arms swinging and hands grasping,
the skin still warm and foreheads glistening.

It’s anyone’s guess when the day will come
when there is nothing left of us
but the bare, solid plinth we once stood upon

now exposed to the open air,
just the wind in the trees and the shadows
of clouds sweeping over its hard marble surface.”

“so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens”